During the past 60 years, computer systems have evolved from primitive, single-processor computer systems that lacked operating systems and compilers for modern, structured programming languages to enormous, geographically distributed computer systems comprising hundreds, thousands, or more individual multi-processor computer systems, linked together with network communications and shared mass-storage facilities, concurrently running many different sophisticated applications. These large, distributed computer systems are often virtualized to provide virtual data centers and virtual-data-center aggregations that, in turn, provide for flexible and efficient system administration. Many cloud-computing facilities provide interfaces to large, virtualized, distributed computing systems that allow clients of the cloud-computing facilities to rapidly and dynamically configure virtual host systems for running client applications that can, in turn, provide computing services to thousands, millions, or more remote users. Many of the virtualization technologies employed within cloud-computing facilities involve virtualization layers that execute above the hardware layer of host computers to provide execution environments for virtual machines. The virtual machines, in turn, provide execution environments for guest operating systems, which, in turn, provide execution environments for applications. This type of virtualization technology provides enormous advantages to owners and administrators of cloud-computing facilities as well as to cloud-computing-facility clients. These virtualization technologies, as one example, can simulate any of many different types of underlying hardware and can therefore provide a virtual hardware platform on which many different types of operating systems can execute. However, the enormous flexibility provided by this type of virtualization technology is associated with certain computational overheads and costs. Another approach to virtualization is referred to as operating system-level virtualization (“OSL virtualization”). While not as flexible and powerful as the traditional virtualization technologies that provide virtualization layers to support virtual-machine execution, OSL virtualization has significantly lower computational overheads and costs, and is, for that reason, an increasingly popular choice for virtual hosting environments, such as those used to run client applications in cloud-computing facilities. Designers and developers of distributed computing systems, designers and developers of cloud-computing facilities, owners and administrators of cloud-computing facilities and other distributed computing systems, and, ultimately, users of distributed computing systems continue to seek efficient and cost-effective technologies that provide a foundation for cloud computing and other virtualized, distributed computing-systems applications.